Can the historical event on 15 December be considered a victory, what goals does the new Church have before itself to gain the trust of world Orthodoxy, and what reform plan it should have are some of the questions we discussed with Fr. Nicholas Denysenko

Religious Studies

In the context of recent events in the Orthodox world, disputes over the boundaries of church institutions often arise between the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Kyiv and Moscow. Ukraine accuses Russia of misappropriating the territory of the Kyiv Metropolis. In its turn, Moscow appeals to the fact that the ancient Kyiv Metropolis differs from the territory of modern Ukraine. RISU decided to clarify this topic, getting advice from historians. Based on this research, we prepared an infographic.

The first question that arises concerning Ukraine is this: with what right and based on which holy canons, does Russia today claim the ecclesiastical and administrative dependency of the Metropolis of Kyiv?

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UGCC Patriarch Sviatoslav’s book is presented in Vatican

On October 25, His Beatitude Sviatoslav's Book Tell Me the Truth. Dialogues About Sense of Life was presented in the Vatican, in the church of St. Lawrence. The book featuring the dialogue of the Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with a professor of the Pontifical Lateran University was published in Italian by the publishing house Cantagalli. The preface was written by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna.

“This book became for me a breath of fresh mountain air, which Rome lacks. All things that His Beatitude Sviatoslav tells in his book are his personal experience and the experience of his Church ... We need this experience of martyrdom and wisdom of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. I was especially impressed by the faithfulness of this Church, nurtured in freedom, or better said that her freedom is the fruit of her faithfulness,” Fr Mauro-Giuseppe Lepori, General Abbot of the Order of the Cistercians, the author of many books on truth in the postmodern age, emphasized in his review.

Fr Matteo Zoppi, Professor at the State University of Genoa, was also presenting the publication. In his review, he drew attention to the methodology of writing a book, “The way of searching for the truth between representatives of the Western and Eastern philosophical and theological traditions through dialogue makes this book interesting not only for believers, but also for those who do not consider themselves believers. The publication does not provide any preliminarily prepared answers to all questions, but invites the reader to search for them.”

His Beatitude Sviatoslav said that the book was born in the Easter context when Fr. Paulo Asolan arrived in Kyiv and communicated with him for almost a week. “At that time, thinking about the Gospel of John about Christ's resurrection, I reflected about the fact that we also witnessed the resurrected body of the Lord. After all, we saw our Church destroyed, crucified, but we also witnessed her glorious resurrection,” said the Primate of the UGCC. In his view, this is “the mission of our Church: to testify to what we saw with our own eyes and touched with our hands.”

The head of the UGCC said that in a conversation with the Holy Father Francis he asked him, “Why did the Lord allow our Church to rise from the dead?” To which the Pope replied, “Your Church seems to have received a special mission from God.”

His Beatitude Sviatoslav ended his thought with the idea that the Universal Church, in its fullness of Eastern and Western traditions, is called in the modern world to “share its spiritual wealth, and Christians should become true witnesses of the resurrected Lord.” And this is exactly “the basis of this book, which was born as a result of a dialogue between two people of faith, with the hope of entering into a dialogue with its readers, in order to understand together the sense of our lives.”

At the end of the presentation Prof. Paolo Asolan emphasized that "the first presentation of the book in the premises of one of the most ancient churches in Rome near the St. Peter's Tomb, is extremely enlightening and symbolic. The Church, which has shown its faithfulness to the successor of the apostle Peter through the blood of its martyrs, today speaks to the Catholic world through the book of His Beatitude Sviatoslav, its present Head and Father."

The presentation was attended by representatives of the State Secretariat of the Apostolic Capital, representatives of various diplomatic missions accredited to the Vatican, teachers and students of the Pontifical universities in Rome. The book will appear in Italian bookstores already on November 8. The publication will be translated into English, Spanish and Ukrainian​​.